The rise of video

Facebook saw video posts per person increase 75% globally in 2014, Instagram sees videos create over two times more engagement than photos and five tweets per second contain a Vine link.

You got it, video popularity is increasing. So much so that if video content continues to grow at the pace it is now, video will account for 79% of all consumer traffic in 2018.(Source:Cisco VNI)

So when Jellyfish's client, Fitbit, wanted to complement their UK TV campaign in the run up to Christmas with online video, we looked to new ways of generating brand awareness (and sales) of the @FitBitUK products.

Having previously worked with Fitbit videos on YouTube and having read about Twitter's native promoted video advertising launched in August 2014, I saw the potential it provided for brand reach with a more relevantly targeted mass audience for Fitbit.

It specifically appealed because of Twitter's continued popularity, the ease of the one-tap video playback in users' timelines and the commercial appeal of paying on a CPV (cost-per-view) model.

Here is what I learned when using Twitter promoted video (TPV) for the first time:

Simple targeting

We kept the Fitbit campaign targeting clear  inclusive of people with an interest in fitness of some kind:

The formula for targeting is easy, pick your categories and let Twitter execute it for you. Their analytics uses data such as the words/terms used in people's profile descriptions and tweets and their engagement data.

Calls to action, conversion metrics and scheduling

Of the two available calls-to-action for Fitbit,  visit the website and  watch video, (there are currently only these two and they are not yet customizable), we chose to use only  visit the website to drive traffic to the site as a key conversion metric.

However transaction conversion metrics spanned more actions:

For conversion/transaction metrics you can track all the above outcomes and it uses an 'any click' model which attributes a conversion to a tweet or campaign when a user completes a  goal.

Basically, the score is given at the point of interaction with that tweet at any point during their journey, but you can't differentiate between  'first click' and 'last click'.

It's worth noting that pre-scheduling promoted video tweets will be available but isn't just yet, nor can you use other applications like Buffer to do so at this stage.

Performance and analytics

Despite simple targeting the video was performing well, the campaign gained over two million impressions overall and benchmarked well above average for engagement (a watch, retweet, favorite or reply):

When looking through Fitbit's performance metrics it became apparent that there were gaps in mobile traffic statistics. Upon testing I saw that if you click out of the Twitter application and into a native browser the tracking got lost.

Twitter loses the cookies and Google Analytics can no longer track the journey but you can use GA UTM tagged URL's. GA tracked links are affective and you can decide if journey information is important enough to warrant this in the first place.

You get all the expected campaign metrics; categories, demographics, engagement, cost-per-click comparisons over the duration of the campaign, etc. However, don't expect to be able to track performance in granular detail like most successful times of day for conversions. It provides key information, but is not a sophisticated analytics tool.

Building on success and reach

Twitter estimates the cost-per-click/cost-per-engagement fairly accurately based on your categories.

And, as to be expected, there was a direct correlation between impressions and engagement over time:

So you can reinvest and re-promote the video on peak campaign days or intervals.

TPV is just like AdWords as the content gains history its quality score increases  so there was a sliding scale of the longer the Fitbit video was promoted the more we could reduce spend.

Because the higher the engagement over time the lower the cost per engagement becomes.

Complement your campaign with remarketing

For Fitbit remarketing promotional standalone tweets about the brand and their products (to those who'd already visited the site) led to the most purchases and engagement of all their Twitter campaigns with half the impressions.

It is clear that building loyal followers and brand value over time provides the biggest returns with Twitter, and using remarketing is a straight forward way of getting more engagement from an already brand aware audience.

Closing the loop between offline and online

Supporting above-the-line-activity with online is a logical cross-media coupling in the era of dual-screening.

Fitbit used television and TPV; the perfect marriage. Because in 48% of cases, a spike in live TV viewing has a meaningful impact on the number of tweets. Brand or product conversations on Twitter, where users see your TV ads, reinforces the marketing message and keeps the brand front-of-mind.

Twitter TV targeting tool

It can also assist with (re)targeting.

Say, for example, someone tweets about X Factor and a Fitbit ad was shown during that time, we can then target that user with a Fitbit tweet simultaneously.

It can also target users that may have experienced their TV ad based on what channels and programs they regularly watch.

This is done through Twitter's own analytics that tie together users who are discussing relevant programs or channels, then serves your ad to these users.

Wider exposure

One of the clear benefits of Twitter promoted video is the usual Twitter features that can be used to optimize campaigns, like handles for reaching other profile's audiences and/or hashtags, which can increase engagement by 100%.

Oh and, of what was tracked, Fitbit got near twelve thousand site visits and over a hundred sales. I've got a feeling Twitter video is here to stay _

Get in touch if you'd like to discuss promoted video as part of your marketing campaign.